Manchester United fans need to give David Moyes some breathing room

Manchester United endured their fourth fifth defeat of the season under David Moyes

“I would like to remind you this club stood by me in bad times, the players and the staff. Your job now is to stand by the new manager”. This was Sir Alex Ferguson’s advice to the Manchester United faithful in his retirement speech at Swansea’s Liberty Stadium on May 5th last year.

Fast forward to January 5th 2014, exactly eight months later, it could be safely said that the United supporters paid no heed to their former manager’s advice. David Moyes endured his fifth home defeat as a Manchester United manager yesterday, a defeat which was a pinprick through the heart for the fans, some of whom simply left the stadium much before the final whistle.

All this was ironically against Swansea – the team who witnessed Sir Alex, who won his final game as Manchester United’s boss, advice the United fans to get behind Moyes.

It goes without saying that replacing Sir Alex Ferguson will be a herculean, if not impossible task so people should quit pestering Moyes for immediate success. Twitter was bombarded with tweets from Red Devils supporters demanding Moyes’s ouster due to the lack of success.

One must not forget that even Sir Alex had to face some extremely trying times before becoming the manager that he was. Sir Alex’s first game as manager ended in a humiliating 2-0 defeat at the hands of Oxford United, a much weaker team, followed by a stalemate against Norwich City. The legendary Scot had to wait till 22nd November 1986 to register his first win as a manager.

The 1989-1990 season was Sir Alex’s toughest season as Manchester United’s boss starting with a 5-1 drubbing at the hands of Manchester City followed by six consecutive defeats in a row. The supporters were growing disillusioned too and made their feelings known when they displayed a banner reading “Three years of excuses and it’s still crap … ta-ra Fergie” at Old Trafford. In spite of that the board stood by Ferguson and had faith in him. The same should be done for David Moyes.

Key players such as Robin Van Persie, Michael Carrick and Wayne Rooney have missed many games due to injury but the team coped fairly well in their absence. Moyes has also got his tactics right in some of the major matches against Chelsea and Arsenal and even managed to lead him team to victory against Liverpool in the Capital One Cup.

The summer transfer fiasco’s were not David Moyes’s fault. Ed Woodward and his poor transfer tactics are to blame, hopefully the new chief executive will pull up his socks this May. The former Everton manager also inherited a greatly underpowered squad from Sir Alex so it will take time before he begins to re-build the team.

Manchester United fans are worried that United will face the same sort of misery Liverpool faced before Brendan Rodgers took over but they should not worry. Manchester United are a much more stable team and so is their manager David Moyes, who served at Everton for a decade to great success and is sure to do the same at Manchester United in time.

Things will get a lot worse before they get any better but Rome was not built in a day and certainly it can’t be re-built in a day. There is a red dawn of the horizon waiting to show itself.